Stay on target

Most of the time, technology is pretty great and makes life a lot easier. The little computers we carry around in our pockets are probably the best example of this, from providing turn-by-turn directions, to giving us a variety of ways to instantly communicate with anyone in the world, to offering a million ways to kill time while waiting in line. However, technology is still pretty flawed, and sometimes does inexplicable things for seemingly no reason at all, like when iTunes suddenly loses track of all your music. If this has happened to you, a quick Google shows that you’re not alone, and for years iPhone owners have suffered from this cruel, seemingly randomly fate.

This issue can actually occur without any human input. You might, for example, be on your way to work in the morning and feel it’s an ASAP Rocky sort of day, but when you take your phone out of your pocket, you find Rocky — and the rest of your music — is all gone even though you haven’t touched your phone since the last time you listened to music. Here’s how to get it all back. Let’s start with the easy things first:

Open your Settings, then go to Music, then make sure Show Apple Music is turned on. If it is, toggle it off then on again. If this doesn’t work, then:

Restart your device. If this doesn’t work, then:

Reset your device by holding down the power button and home button until you see the Apple logo, then wait for your device to restart

A quick Google finds that a few users have reported the above steps have worked, and while many more users have reported that these steps didn’t work for them, it’s worth trying mainly because it takes no time and might save a lot of effort.

Next up, you’ll need to check if iTunes thinks the missing music is still on your device. The most widely reported iteration of this issue is that iTunes basically “delisted” your music — it’s still there on your device taking up storage space, but iTunes doesn’t recognize it as music.

Connect your device to iTunes, and see if the missing music is taking up space on your phone; iTunes tends to list the ghost music as “Other” media, rather than music. Check that little storage capacity breakdown bar at the bottom of iTunes when your device is selected

If you have a ton of “Other” media that suspiciously takes up around the same storage capacity as your missing music should: Backup your device to either iCloud or your computer, then erase all your device’s content and settings. Then, simply restore your device from the backup. Users have reported that this will jolt your device into recognizing your music. Both the backup and restore might take a while depending on how much data you’re working with. It’ll go faster if you back up to and restore from a computer rather than iCloud

If the above method didn’t work, then follow this method to recover the storage space that the “Other” files are taking up and get your music recognized again. It’s a little technical, but the steps are thoroughly explained

If the music is just straight-up gone instead of taking up space as musical ghost files, then your best bet is so simply take the unfortunate bug in stride, and manually restore the music to your device. Reports have claimed that sometimes a library sync (rather than manually adding your music) won’t stick.

Make sure your device is connected to iTunes, select your device, click Summary in the left sidebar, navigate to the Options section, then check the “Manually manage music and videos” box. From here, just drag and drop your music to your phone, make sure your album art is how you like, and organize to your heart’s content

No one seems to know exactly why this obnoxious issue happens, but with the above methods, you’ll save yourself a lot of research time and can just get to restoring your library.